According to the report, the five guiding principles the government should follow to make this happen are:
1. Create a strong, streamlined and regulatory foundation that fosters innovation.
2. Reshape and build government infrastructure to build capacity for research and development and facilitate translation and commercialization potential.
3. Facilitate technology access as well as market access for innovation products to achieve scale through public procurement.
4. Promote biotech entrepreneurship and provide a channel to access risk capital for all stages of biotechnology product lifecycle.
5. Nucleate and foster networks and triple helix collaborations.

One of the key suggestions is to set up a "Centre for Biotechnology Policy and Regulatory Sciences" on the lines of the Institute for Manufacturing in University of Cambridge, UK, which brings together all the elements of regulation, policies, industry-government interactions, academia-industry interactions and business strategy. The report has also called for setting up fully equipped technology transfer offices in all science and technology research centers.

The government has declared this to be the Decade of Innovation. " Biotechnology is synonymous with innovation," commented Dr Vijay Chandru, who headed ABLE from 2009-12 and Dr P M Murali, current president of ABLE in their foreword in the report. "The innovation imperatives are clear enough - biosimilars and diagnostics for affordable healthcare, integrated traditional medicine, green biotech for less dependence on petroleum, bioremediation for environmental recovery, agricultural productivity and value addition, leapfrogging with genomics, synthetic biology and biomedical informatics."

In the past decade, India's biotech industry has come into its and laid the foundations for the future. It is time now to build on these foundations and embrace the future strong commitment focused on innovation.

(To view and download the full report in .PDF format click here: Indian Biotechnology - The Roadmap to the Next Decade and Beyond)